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Comment by dirktheman | Hacker News Reader

Ah... Monkey Island. I have such fond memories of not just MI, but also other Lucasarts/Sierra adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Sam&Max, Full Throttle, Willy Beamish, King's Quest, Space Quest, etc. I owe a large part (if not most!) of my English skills to these games.

Recently, I bought my daughter an old '99 ibook Clamshell on a yard sale. I upgraded the RAM and substituted the hard drive for a CompactFlash card. Most of these games are free downloads these days, so we spend hours playing them. Some of them look a bit aged, but generally they hold up pretty well. The experience is still as captivating as it was back then.

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Me too. I learned english "by force" by playing basically Monkey Island and Indiana Jones series. Funny thing is that I played them a lot in pair. I would go to a friend's house and we would play together, even if is essentially a one player game.

One that infuriated me was King's Quest, the one that you could type anything you want the character to do. Such a powerful potential, but I took days just to discover the term "pick up", to pick up a book, for example. My basic english didn't know that verb, I tried every variation of get, hold, put in pocket and stuff.

I think "take" worked. Sierra games had extremely limited vocabularies, of course. The Infocom games and later those by Magnetic Scrolls were much more advanced at natural language parsing; you could type "put key in bottle", and if you had several bottles it would ask you "Which bottle?" and you could simply answer "the green bottle". Wish I could think of more examples, but it's been a long time.

What was that like? I've never tried playing a game in a different language before. How much English did you already know before starting those games?

Very basic vocabulary, I was like 10 years old and studied english at school, like, 2 hours a week. We used to play with a dictionary on our hands.

It is not easy, but still fun. It took around (i'm guessing here) 5 or 6 times more time to play it.

I played a lot of games as a pair with friends around that time. I think it was something about liking games that had a story and therefore didn't lend themselves well to taking turns. We even played Quake like this a few times, one person moving the other shooting, even when we could have taken it in turns with a level each.

I also remember arguing with my sister about who got to play Commander Keen one day, so our mum blindfolded one of us and had the other shout directions.

Thanks for reminding me, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it at the time.

WOW! your mother is a genius! Noted here for my future parenting guidelines! :D

King's quest was easier the alternatives. The worst for foreigners was Police quest. One command was seared into my brain: 'administer sobriety test'

Good luck figuring that out with a small learner's dictionary.

Police Quest was pretty picky. I remember the scene where you have to get the suspect from the car laying down on the ground. Shouting "Lay Down" would only give you nitpicking about the sexual meaning of "laying", which I never got until later.

Heh, this morning I was thinking about this in the shower, don't know why.

The worst for me was the part in the sewer, where you had to write "look at shit". I only knew the word's pronunciation. Spent days on the combinations: shed, ched, poop, and so on.

Hehe yeah I remember also going through a dictionary with my friend to look how to pronounce these things, and our mother helped too. Brought together the whole family for a while.

The worst for me was the "monkey wrench" puzzle in Monkey Island 2 ... Being French, playing with the French version, I had no way to put this together. I ended up trying every item combination in the whole game world until I found the correct one by accident. Took me days.

Don't forget the Indiana Jones games. Fate of Atlantis was a great game.

There is also Beneath a Steel Sky which is fantastic and now free. http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Beneath_a_Steel_Sky

Did you ever play "Martian Memorandum", one of the Tex Murphy series?

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

I've been looking for years for this! I thought the name of the game was "under a red moon" or something like that but I couldn't remember. There were some shards of memory from a secret moon base and a head in a water cooler, but I just couldn't recall the name, franchise or anything else to put me in the right direction.

AFK right now...

"Under a killing moon" is the name of another Tex Murphy game.

If you liked the Tex Murphy games, a new one was made recently with a kickstarter campaign; http://www.bigfinishgames.com/games/tesla-effect

As games go it's a bit hit and miss, but if you already like Tex Murphy, it's a winner.

Hadn't come across them. Will take a look. Thanks.

Anyone remember Torin's Passage?

I never understood why George Lucas went with some nonsense alien plot for his new Indiana Jones. Fate of Atlantis was brilliant. It was pure Indy. It would have made a perfect 4th movie.

Yeah great game. Wonder how much nostalgia is part of my mindfak.

I realise my comment won't add much to the discussion, but Day of the Tentacle was a masterpiece.

Double Fine is apparently working to release a remastered version next year, and they were able to get the original reworked assets from LucasArts Singapore.

http://mixnmojo.com/news/Double-Fine-Has-The-LucasArts-Singa...

Day of the Tentacle was one of the games I was crazy about as a teen. What a lovely game!

> Most of these games are free downloads these days

Not legally, just conveniently.

Beneath a Steel Sky is completely free

Yep. Don't know about elsewhere, but you get it and a handful of others when you sign up for Good Old Games

You can download it on the ScummVm webpage if I recall correctly.

Or as an apt package on debian-based linux.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Quest for Glory series yet (originally Hero's Quest)

QfG 1 (the one that made it to Mac) was pretty OG. Still one of the most creative RPG/adventure games ever.

If you didn't also play the Leisure Suit Larry series, you have really missed out. Hopefully that was included in your "etc."!

I thought these were all DOS-based (Intel CPU) games...

How are you running these on a PowerPC/G3?

They are mostly pre-intel based games, as Apple switched to Intel in 2002. They are free for download through sites like macintoshgarden.org. Otherwise I use an emulator (Basilisk/SheepShaver) on my own PC/Mac.

Thank you. I remember playing some of these on a 486DX-33MHz in the early 90s.

I wasn't aware there was a Motorola CPU based version.

As others have said, there goes my weekend. Time to dig out my old G4 laptop, or the PowerBook 520c I seem to have kept for some reason...

Did I say thank you?

Nitpick: The Intel switch was in 2006.

I don't know how the parent is actually doing it, but many of these classic adventure games date back to a time when there were multiple competing architectures; the games were often written in some kind of bytecode, and getting them running on modern hardware just needs a new implementation of the VM, like ScummVM.

I would hardly call my '99 iBook G3 300mhz "modern"...

Scummvm - http://scummvm.org

Clamshell iBooks are capable of running OSX. Not spectacularly well (they are 366 or 466 MHz machines with limeted RAM), but still.

While I maxed out on the RAM (a whopping 512MB), as it's one of the first clamshells it's limited by a 300Mhz processor. So no OSX for me. I don't mind, it's on 9.2 right now, which is about the most stable as they come. And with my homemade ssd (CF card with IDE adapter) it's blazing fast!

I remember running 10.1 and 10.2 on the 466 Mhz/320 MB RAM clamshell. Not very fast, but enough for ScummVM.

I didn't know that OSX does not run on the original iBook.

I think the highest OS X version you can install on a clamshell is 10.4. I have it on one of mine (with memory maxed out to 576 Mb). As you say, it's not real fast, but ScummVM works, and so do C64 and GBA emulators.

Scummvm under Linux Mint PPC should run faster than OSX.

Most of these LucasArts graphical adventure games were written using a game engine known as SCUMM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUMM) that was able to target different platforms, which was ported to the Mac and so ran on 68k and later PowerPC Macs. There is now an emulator that can play SCUMM games on almost any platform known as ScummVM (http://scummvm.org/).

Good memories!

The Dig deserves a place on that list as well.

although it came later, don't forget Outlaws! Maybe the most underrated and unknown top-10 game of all time.